got me thinking about Marshallese vowels and the perpetual mystery
of Tangut rhymes again for the first time since 2014. The very
first time I thought of comparing Marshallese with Tangut was in 2010.
And nearly a decade later, it was the sight of Kwajalein
in IPA that got me on that track again:

Similarily, the complex vowels of Tangut could have been just six
basic vowels (u i a y e o)
that 'warped' under the influence of consonants with various qualities
(pharyngealized, uvularized, and plain from a Xun Gong-type
perspective).

The 'grades' of Tangut correspond to those qualities. I write grades
as numbers after basic vowels: e.g., ka1 is grade I ka.

I could write Marshallese using a similar notation: e.g.,
/kʷɨwatʲlʲɜjɜnʲ/ (?) 'Kwajalein' as k1ɨw1at3l3ɜjɜn3. I can't
place the 'grade' numbers after the vowels since vowels are
influenced by consonants on either side, and not all consonants are
followed by phonemic vowels. In my Marshallese 'grade' system, 1 is
labial(ized)
and 3 is palata(lized); 2 - not in 'Kwajalein' - is velar(ized).

intellectual sport - to write a given language with as few
simple letters as possible, preferably no other than those to be found
on an American typewriter.

/ʷ/, /ʲ/, and /ɜ/ obviously aren't found on an American typewriter
(or any typewriter unless it's been customized, I imagine), but the
problem remains: how far should a phonemic analysis go before it no
longer corresponds to reality?

Thirty years ago tonight, リュムナデスのカー
サ Ryumunadesu no Kāsa 'Limnades Caça' made his animated
debut on Saint Seiya. I had first seen him in the manga some
months before that. That was my first exposure to the name of a kind of naiad. I had
assumed the Greek name was Lymnades since Japanese
borrows Greek y as yu. But in fact the closest Greek
name is Λιμνάδες Limnádes with i, not y.

Could mangaka Kurumada Masami have arbitrarily changed リムナデス
Rimunadesu to リュムナデス Ryumunadesu?
I have doubts because I don't remember him altering any other foreign
mythological names. This
page lists many of those names as spelled in his manga/the anime:
e.g., スキュラ Skyura
'Σκύλλα Scylla' (with the expected yu : Greek
y correspondence).

The same katakana spelling appears in 門あさ美 Kado Asami's song title リュム
ナデス Ryumunadesu from 1985 - three years before the Ryumunadesu
in the Saint Seiya manga. Did Kurumada get his spelling from
the song, or do both attestations of Ryumunadesu independently
derive from a common source?

The fact that this
entry in 幻想世界神話辞典 Gensō sekai shinwa jiten 'Fantasy and
World Mythology Dictionary') is titled リュムナデス Ryumunadesu
and cites two sources

suggests that the リュムナデス Ryumunadesu
spelling has a life beyond and a history predating the Seiya
character and the song title.

Might リュムナデス Ryumunadesu have originated as a
error by some Meiji period translator who confused Greek i with
y? I'm guessing the spelling might go as far back as Meiji since
I can't imagine the Japanese only learning about the Limnades during
the last century. Unfortunately Google Books Ngram Viewer
doesn't do Japanese yet, so I can't see any attestations of the
spelling in old books.

If I had more time, I'd write an English dictionary of Jurchen
characters, building upon the foundation that Jin Qizong laid in his
1984 女真文辞典 Nüzhenwen cidian 'Jurchen dictionary'. Ideally it'd
be online so I could continually update it. But in reality ... you'll
get random blog entries like this one about this character or that.

Tonight's character is numbered 1284 in N3788¹.
It is only attested
as the first half of mahila 'hat' in the Sino-Jurchen
vocabulary of the Bureau of Translators (Kiyose #547):

1284 0176 <HAT la>

Although 1284 does not appear in which seems to be the earliest
surviving list of Jurchen characters, I suspect that it was originally
a standalone character for mahila 'hat' in the early 12th
century, and that
<la> was later added to it as a phonetic clarifier at some point
prior to the compilation of the Sino-Jurchen vocabulary in the 15th
century. I agree with Jin Qizong who regards it as a pictograph.

The second character 0176 is a common phonogram for la. See
Kiyose (1977: 70) for a list of its other occurrences within the
vocabulary and Jin Qizong (1984: 36-37) for examples in other texts. It
is apparently the sole Jurchen character pronounced la.

I think
of 0176 as Chinese 友 'friend' with an extra dot, but the first stroke
of
the part of 0176 resembling the 又 component (originally a drawing of a
hand, though it does not
represent a word for 'hand' in Chinese) stretches further leftward,
crossing over the 丿
stroke (part of 𠂇, a drawing of another hand). How many Chinese
students of Jurchen miswrote 0176 as 友 plus a dot?

¹If I use N4631 numbers for Khitan large script, I
might as well use
N3788 numbers for the Jurchen (large) script.

²1.28.20:35: The Tangut script is a rich
source of pareidolic
stimuli. After 23 years, I suddenly 'saw' the hand-shape in the
right-hand component 𘦳 of 𗁅 3485. (I still don't know why that component,
often regarded as 'hand', cannot stand alone and needed a vertical
stroke to be a standalone character.) If one pulls apart 又 into its
component strokes フ and 乀, inserts two more 丿 between them, and adds
two strokes 丷 on top, the result is 𘦳.

One could also subtract what I've called the 𘡊
'horned hat' and see the remaining 𘢌 as
Chinese 手 'hand' tilted 45 degrees, but I think the resemblance between
the two elements is coincidental. 𘢌 is
often (but not always!) 'person', and Grinstead (1972) has derived it
from a variant of Chinese 人 'person' with two extra intersecting
strokes on the bottom right. (Alas, that variant is not yet in Unicode.
Here
is a similar variant with three nonintersecting strokes.)

I have recently come in possession of a number of early T'ang
documents written in a script that bears very close similarity with
Tangut. These documents will be the subject of a later communication,
but they appear to solve the mystery [of the origin of the Tangut
script] discussed above. I wish to thank Prof. Edward S.I. Wang of
the Chinese Culture University in Taipei for having drawn my attention
to these documents.

Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge Kwanten never wrote about
those documents or about Tangut again.

If I assume that those documents (which I have never seen) indeed
contained a Tangut-like script from the early Tang, and if I take into
account the fact that the Tangut ruling house claimed descent from the Tuoba of the Northern Wei
(see Dunnell 1994: 157-158 for a discussion of interpretations of that
claim), I
can come up with this highly speculative and almost certainly wrong
scenario:

- The Tuoba rulers spoke both Serbi and a Tibeto-Burman language
(pre-Tangut?)

- The lost Serbi script was an offshoot of the Chinese script
designed to write both languages (cf. Pahawh Hmong
which was intented to write both Hmong and Khmu, though no examples of
Khmu in Pahawh Hmong have survived)

- The Tangut script is a western descendant of this script, and
the Parhae script is an eastern descendant. Khitan and Jurchen
large scripts both descend from the Parhae script.

One huge problem with this is that I am unaware of any evidence for
any Tibeto-Burman language in the Northern Wei. The Chinese
transcriptions of Middle Serbi analyzed by Shimunek (2017: 125-163) are
Mongolic-like (Janhunen's Para-Mongolic, a term Shimunek rejects), not
Tibeto-Burman.

Another huge problem is that there is no resemblance between the
Tangut script on the one hand and the Parhae/Jurchen/Khitan (PJK?)
scripts on the other beyond a shared set of Chinese stroke types. No
one is going to confuse Jurchen

0176 la

with the Tangut element (not character) 𘦳
'hand', much less the actual Tangut character for 'hand', 𗁅 3485 1laq1.